[Seizing the day and living it to the full: thirty years' independent innovation of growth factors and wound repair].

Since the discovery of fibroblast growth factor (FGF) in the early 20th century, the multiple regulatory function of FGF has been found in development, metabolic regulation and tissue regeneration. Although FGF has the potential in wound healing of clinical practice, several technical bottlenecks occurred in the development of FGF drugs. Since 1992, our team has had many technical breakthroughs and developed some class Ⅰ new drugs of FGF and medical device. At the same time, we further investigated the network of metabolic regulation and signal transduction of FGF. All the efforts were for the purpose of the development of FGF new drugs and bringing benefit to patients.

The discovery of angiogenic factors: a historical review.

Angiogenesis is a biological process by which new capillaries are formed and it occurs in many physiological and pathological conditions. It is controlled by the net balance between molecules that have positive and negative regulatory activity and this concept had led to the notion of the "angiogenic switch," depending on an increased production of one or more of the positive regulators of angiogenesis. Numerous inducers of angiogenesis have been identified and this review offers a historical account of the relevant literature concerning the discovery of the best-characterized angiogenic factors.

The first pure embryonic inducing factor.

This is a personal account of the discovery of the mesoderm-inducing activity of fibroblast growth factors. The background is my work on the dorsalising signal in early amphibian embryos that was done at the imperial Cancer Research Fund in London. I became interested in mesoderm induction because of the embryologic work of Nieuwkoop and the partial purification of a "vegetalising factor" by Tiedemann. Although, initially, we expected inducing factors to be novel substances, it gradually became clear that the impure preparations we were studying had properties in common with growth factors. This opened the way to the testing of candidate factors, resulting in the conclusion that some inducing factors and growth factors,in fact, were the same molecules despite being discovered through different routes and assayed using different methods. After a slow start looking at the molecular biology of fibroblast growth factors in Xenopus, we eventually found that their most interesting functions in early development lay not at the stage of mesoderm induction but, rather, in the anteroposterior patterning of the body, which occurs during gastrulation.